Professor Bran Nicol

A decade into the twentieth century, Sherlock Holmes seemed to have entered a kind of semi-retirement. In ‘The Devil’s Foot’, published in The Strand in December 1910, Watson explains that the reason he has provided his readers with so few new case studies over recent years is because of his friend’s ‘aversion to publicity’. It is certainly not, he continues – protesting perhaps a little too much – because of ‘any lack of interesting material’ (‘The Devil’s Foot’, His Last Bow : 153). Instead of a new case, Holmes has suggested that he write about a case which happened in Cornwall some 13 years previously. Even then, Holmes seems to have been a little the worse for wear, and is away from London to recuperate on the advice of his doctor:

In Picturing the Human, her 2000 study of Murdoch’s philosophy, Maria Antonaccio comments that ‘[i]t is difficult to write about Murdoch without being drawn into her life and personality, rather than concentrating on the substance of her thought’ (Antonaccio 2000: v). This statement is a measure of the radical change that has recently taken place in ‘Murdoch studies’. Had Antonaccio been writing before the author’s well-documented illness and death instead of after, one might have expected her to say the exact opposite. For years Murdoch’s work had a curious, almost magical ability to ward off biographical readings. Little in the way of substantial biographical detail was readily available, due to Murdoch’s reluctance to speak about her life outside her work. The lack of information was complemented by her insistence in her literary theory that the serious author had a duty to ‘expel’ herself from her work. Why look for her if she was not likely to be there?

London’s civic world included the Thames and the city walls, the main market (Cheapside), the Guildhall, major churches, wards, and parishes, the physical features that had a role in the city’s ceremonial life. Social divisions played a crucial role in urban life. To be “free of the city” (citizens or freemen) was a franchise limited to those who completed apprenticeships or bought the right. The number of freemen was a small fraction of the population, and among them, the members of the elite who governed was even smaller. London’s society was hierarchical at every level, with elites taking leadership positions in government and in the gilds. Londoners were loyal and curious about their history. They kept books with stories of its creation and major events and documents. The proximity of the Tower on one side and Westminster on the other were influential in London’s relationship with the crown.

Making sense of the past is a common concern among post-war novelists, especially English ones. In The Situation of the Novel, published in 1970, Bernard Bergonzi argued that, as a result of the uncertainties brought about by recent history, contemporary fiction was poised somewhere ‘between nostalgia and nightmare’, alternatively or simultaneously imagining a brutal apocalyptic future and ‘a vanished era’, most often that of the ‘Edwardian summer’.1

The Bell is one of Murdoch’s most important and popular achievements. Less melodramatic and less willing to deploy the devices of the romance than many of her others (even though it trades in familiar scenarios and character-types) its sense of restraint renders it more like a ‘traditional’ version of realism than much of her early work. The novel also shows how naturally a preoccupation with the past functions as the motor in Murdoch’s fiction, driving the other themes she is perhaps more consciously keen to deal with, such as religion, subjectivity, and the nature of love.

The Italian Girl and The Sea, the Sea have less obviously in common than the other pairs of novels we have considered. They are worlds apart in terms of critical appraisal: one is almost universally agreed to be Murdoch’s weakest novel, the other stands as the Booker Prize-winning peak of her ‘great decade’, the seventies. The Italian Girl more closely resembles the obsessional ‘closed-up’ books A Severed Head and A Word Child. It is an uncanny Gothic tale narrated in an anachronistic voice which more often seems like a pastiche of Poe than anything convincing in its own right. All of its characters seem caught up in a collective delusion. As Isabel remarks, ‘We are all prisoners here. We are like people in an engraving’ (IG 41). The Sea, the Sea, on the other hand, is closer to Under the Net and The Black Prince. It is a novel written by an ‘artist’ self-consciously engaged in a quest into the past to find truth, both circumstantial and metaphysical. Charles Arrowby, its hero, displays an epistemophilia which is at times more pronounced than that of his predecessors as he tries desperately to make sense of events going on around him and to unravel the ‘terrible mystery’ of why his first love left him. Yet for all their dissimilarity, I think there is something in both novels that is largely absent in the others, and which is central to

The Italian Girl and The Sea, the Sea have less obviously in common than the other pairs of novels we have considered. They are worlds apart in terms of critical appraisal: one is almost universally agreed to be Murdoch’s weakest novel, the other stands as the Booker Prize-winning peak of her ‘great decade’, the seventies. The Italian Girl more closely resembles the obsessional ‘closed-up’ books A Severed Head and A Word Child. It is an uncanny Gothic tale narrated in an anachronistic voice which more often seems like a pastiche of Poe than anything convincing in its own right. All of its characters seem caught up in a collective delusion. As Isabel remarks, ‘We are all prisoners here. We are like people in an engraving’ (IG 41). The Sea, the Sea on the other hand, is closer to Under the Net and TheBlack Prince. It is a novel written by an ‘artist’ self-consciously engaged in a quest into the past to find truth, both circumstantial and metaphysical. Charles Arrowby, its hero, displays an epistemophilia which is at times more pronounced than that of his predecessors as he tries desperately to make sense of events going on around him and to unravel the ‘terrible mystery’ of why his first love left him. Yet for all their dissimilarity, I think there is something in both novels that is largely absent in the others, and which is central to Murdoch’s work as a whole: the sense of nostalgia.

A Severed Head and A Word Child belong in the category of her fiction Murdoch has referred to as ‘closed-up, rather obsessional novels’ (Rose, 1968).1 Other novels in this group would include works from the earlier part of her career like The Italian Girl, The Unicorn and The Time of the Angels, where an entire community of characters seems to be living out a collective fantasy, and the solipsism of the cast is paralleled by the melodrama of the plot and the claustrophia of the setting. The obsessional novels often draw on the Gothic tradition (in The Unicorn a governess goes to stay in a foreboding castle) and, in their compulsive patterning, are close to Murdoch’s conception of the crystalline novel. They underline just how difficult it is to achieve the ‘opened out’ form of love Murdoch speaks of in the above epigraph. The dilemma is intrinsically connected to her specialized conception of Eros, the fusion of spirituality and sex which she derives from Plato and Freud. In her obsessional novels the Platonic ideal of ascesis is conspicuous only in isolated glimpses; for the most part, the characters remain locked into a way of behaving that resembles Freud’s baser version of the soul.

A common critical procedure in examining Murdoch’s writing has been to measure her novels against her philosophy, to consider (for example) whether the behaviour of her characters and the events depicted in her plots exemplify or compromise her ethical principles. This is understandable given the remarkable clarity and consistency of her moral philosophy over four decades, the similarity between the scenarios repeatedly presented in her novels and the issues dealt with in her nonfiction, and perhaps also because of an implicit hierarchy which prevails in contemporary critical practice whereby theoretical pronouncements are privileged over fictional practice.

This is the first book to collect the most important contributions to the theory of the postmodern novel over the last forty years and to guide readers through the complex questions and wide-ranging debates. The selections in this book will enable readers to place the theory of postmodern fiction in a broader intellectual and cultural context.

In Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (1966), Patricia Highsmith’s “how-to” book (and a work of characteristically displaced autobiography), the author describes the genesis of her 1964 novel The Two Faces of January: "My impetus for this book was strong but quite fuzzy at the beginning. I wanted to write a book about a young, footloose American (I called him Rydal [Keener]) in search of adventure, not a beatnik but a rather civilized and intelligent young man, and not a criminal, either. And I wanted to write about the effect on this young man of encountering a stranger who closely resembles his own domineering father." Despite her evident pride that the novel ended up on “the bestseller list in England” (Highsmith, Plotting 11), The Two Faces of January was poorly received by Joan Kahn, her editor at the U.S. publisher Harper and Brothers, and then by reviewers, all of whom found the plot—especially the question of Keener’s motive for his subsequent involvement with Chester MacFarland, the older man who leads him into crime—too implausible. In demanding a rewrite Kahn insisted: “The book makes sense only if there is a homosexual relationship between Rydal and Chester” (Wilson 230). Apparently furious at the prospect of rewriting the book, Highsmith nevertheless complied and, according to her biographer, Andrew Wilson, began to “completely rethink the motivation of her characters.” In doing so, however, she tried even harder to “eliminate any suspicion of a homosexual relationship between the two men” (Wilson 231). Deducing a homosexual motive is a temptation to which readers and interpreters of Highsmith’s work often succumb. The flaw of Anthony Minghella’s otherwise excellent film adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), for example, is its decision to make Ripley’s latent homosexuality manifest. “Queering” him in this way is a mistake, precisely because it provides a motivation for Ripley’s behavior that is never apparent in the novel and turns him into someone with whom viewers can identify. Ripley’s attitude toward Dickie Greenleaf is darker and more complicated. As Slavoj Žižek has put it, "Minghella’s Ripley makes clear what’s wrong with trying to be more radical than the original by bringing out its implicit, repressed content. By looking to fill in the void, Minghella actually retreats from it. Instead of a polite person who is at the same time a monstrous automaton, experiencing no inner turmoil as he commits his crimes, we get the wealth of a personality, someone full of psychic traumas, someone whom we can, in the fullest meaning of the term, understand." Motivation is rarely clear-cut in Highsmith. In fact, perhaps the most fascinating mystery in each of her novels is about the personalities of the characters she creates. Although we identify with their predicament and remain absorbed in their web of intrigue, their identities remain strangely opaque. Arguably, this is also true of their sexual identities. This essay aims, therefore, to suggest not that homosexuality is irrelevant to Highsmith’s fiction, but rather that the obscurity of the question of motive in her fiction makes it more profitable to consider its overall homosocial context—that is, the “social bonds between persons of the same sex” (Sedgwick, Between 1). To do so, it will interrogate Highsmith’s relation to tropes of crime fiction and gothic, and point to her significance as a chronicler of the late-twentieth-century world

This essay explores the relationship between Elizabeth Wurtzel and David Foster Wallace, two writers who are in different ways representative of the 'in-between' status of the 1990s, and who both pioneered different modes of writing which remain influential today: Wurtzel's 'obscene' (in Baudrillard's terms) confessional style, and Wallace's post-postmodern aesthetics of sincerity. In particular it considers Wallace's short story 'The Depressed Person' (from his collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men), which is widely understood to be 'about' Wurtzel. While somewhat cruel and misogynistic on the surface, the hauntological dimension of this text - ie the effect created by the posthumous context of reading it now, when both writer and alleged subject are no longer with us - opens up a different reading, one which enables us to explore the association with depression which is central to understanding both authors. The essay compares 'The Depressed Person' to Wurtzel's own rather circumspect memorial of Wallace, 'Beyond the Trouble, More Trouble', published in 2008 shortly after his death. Read posthumously, both texts come to seem unlikely companion pieces. For all their substantial differences, both effectively advance a similar, bleak yet carefully considered, conclusion about what it means to suffer with depression which casts new light on Wallace's notion of sincerity and Wurtzel's 'obscene' approach to autobiography.

An introduction to Hammett which considers his credentials as a 'popular' and 'literary' author.

Contributors discuss a range of poetry, prose and drama, including the work of John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Ted Hughes and Helen Fielding.

Postmodernism and the Contemporary Novel: A Readeris the first book to collect the most important contributions to the theory of the postmodern novel over the last forty years and to guide readers through the complex questions and wide ...

This new edition includes detailed readings of novels not discussed in the original (The Bell, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, and The Philosopher's Pupil) and includes a new preface, an updated bibliography and three new chapters ...

By broadening the focus beyond classic English detective fiction, the American ‘hard-boiled’ crime novel and the gangster movie, Crime Cultures breathes new life into staple themes of crime fiction and cinema. Leading international scholars from the fields of literary and cultural studies analyze a range of literature and film, from neglected examples of film noir and ‘true crime’, crime fiction by female African American writers, to reality TV, recent films such as Elephant, Collateral and The Departed, and contemporary fiction by J. G. Ballard, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Margaret Atwood. They offer groundbreaking interpretations of new elements such as the mythology of the hitman, technology and the image, and the cultural impact of ‘senseless’ murders and reveal why crime is a powerful way of making sense of the broader concerns shaping modern culture and society.

Since the early days of cinema, the private eye has been one of its most memorable characters, often viewed as a romantic hero, a ‘lone wolf’ who confronts and tries to make sense of a violent and chaotic modern world. In The Private Eye Bran Nicol challenges this stereotype, offering a fresh take on iconic figures such as Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe and Jake Gittes, and a cogent reappraisal of film noir. Analysing a wide range of films, including classics such as The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Chinatown, and The Long Goodbye, Nicol traces the history of the private eye movie from the influential film noirs of the 1940s, through innovative 1970s neo-noir cinema, to the presence of the private eye in movie mythology today. He reveals that although these films are exciting thrillers, they are nevertheless preoccupied by ‘domestic’ issues: work, home and love. Rather than fearless investigation, Nicol argues, the private eye’s job is really about unveiling the private lives and private spaces of others, an achievement which comes at the expense of his own private life. Combining a lucid introduction to an under-explored tradition in movie history with a novel approach to the detective in film, this book casts new light on the private worlds of the private eye.

One of the more interesting science fiction movies of recent years, at least to Humanities academics, is Denis Villeneuve's 2016 alien-invasion movie, Arrival. It is a film which not only features a Professor of Linguistics as its heroine, but the plot of which is organised around the critical global importance of a multi-million dollar translation project. This essay compares the film with the original novella upon which it was based - Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life" (1998) - to examine the role translation plays in both, with the aim of placing this in the context of the crisis in the Humanities which has marked universities over the last few years, and can be linked to a more general crisis in liberal values. While founded upon a time-honoured science fiction scenario the movie also clearly articulates the sense of global peril which is typical of much of the cultural production of our current times, manifested in fears about ecological catastrophe, terrorist attacks, and the anthropocene, etc. Another of its crisis-points is also 'very 2016': its ability to use science fiction tropes to express an anxiety about how liberal values are in danger of being overtaken by a self-interested, forceful, intolerant kind of politics. Arrival is as much a work of 'hu-fi' as it is 'sci-fi', that is, 'Humanities fiction', a film which uses Chiang's original novella to convey a message about the restorative potential of 'Humanities values' in the face of a new global threat.

D. M. Thomas is one of the most controversial writers of our time - considered by some a major voice in contemporary fiction, by others a dubious literary 'impostor' who repeatedly appropriates female sexuality, the holocaust, and the work ...

Dave Eggers's What is the What and Zeitoun are transnational works in that their narratives detail a passage between nations and concentrate on the experiences of individuals of 'hyphenated identity'. The sequence of novels Eggers has published in the second decade of the twenty-first century mark a distinctive 'American turn' in his work which offers an alternative but complementary transnational perspective. Hologram for the King (2012), The Circle (2013), Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? (2014) and Heroes of the Frontier (2016) focus on 'unhyphenated' American protagonists, and examine the United States both as a specific place and as itself typical of a nation in the globalised twenty-first century world. In their post-postmodern ethical approach to fiction and their assumption that fiction's duty is to 'make reality credible', as Philip Roth once put it, these novels are themselves typical of the values and practices of a specifically US historical category, Mark McGurl's Program Era, but also of categories of transnational fiction critics have recently described as 'global' or 'planetary'. Eggers's US quartet critiques globalisation, but is ultimately more interested in asserting the value of connections between human beings in a globalised world.

When it was published in 2011, Gods Without Men was described by one reviewer, Lisa Appignanesi, as ‘Kunzru’s great American novel’ (2011). There is a note of irony in this description, partly because the very idea of the Great American Novel, or ‘GAN’ as Henry James called it, the encapsulation of the ‘essence’ of a nation as vast, multifaceted, and multicultural as America in novel form (see Buell, 2014), is ironic in itself. But it is also because Hari Kunzru is neither American nor indeed easy to pigeonhole in any one national or racial category, for anyone minded to do

Poe’s ‘The Man of the Crowd’, as Patricia Merivale has observed, be justifiably be considered a counterpart to ‘The Purloined Letter’ in its significance in cultural theory. It has been particularly valued as a kind of sociological document which reveals and critiques aspects of the scopic and material conditions of the modern city.Yet despite an almost universal acknowledgement that the tale is about ‘reading’, most critics have worked with a rather impoverished model of reading. Following the example of Tom Gunning, who has argued that the tale provides premonitions of a range of spectator positions in cinema, this essay argues that the story dramatizes typical responses to the literary text which are more complex than the flan flanerie. To place the text in a more explicitly literary context opens it up to an analysis which takes account of how complex its structure is, and the fact that the narrator has typically-Poe-esque ‘delusional’ credentials, and acknowledge how this might compromise or complicate some of the arguments about urban reading. As such it demands to be considered in terms of the capacity of Poe’s fiction to seduce readers into what Joseph Kronick has called, ‘identifying the intepretation with the text’, particularly in relation to the particular self-reflexive effect Garrett Stewart has termed the ‘gothic of reading’.

The book not only questions established critical and philosophical positions, but also Murdoch's own pronouncements about her work. It suggests fresh influences and interpretations, and celebrates Murdoch's interdisciplinary modernity.

Translation into Italian of Stalking (Reaktion Books, 2006)

Bran Nicol traces here the history of stalking and chronicles how acts of extreme obsession have created a public fixation of their own.

This volume, featuring contributions from a number of leading scholars, explores the ways in which the moral positions Iris Murdoch adopts in her philosophy and theology can be aligned with her fiction, demonstrating how Murdoch's work can ...

Postmodern fiction presents a challenge to the reader: instead of enjoying it passively, the reader has to work to understand its meanings, to think about what fiction is, and to question their own responses. Yet this very challenge makes postmodern writing so much fun to read and rewarding to study. Unlike most introductions to postmodernism and fiction, this book places the emphasis on literature rather than theory. It introduces the most prominent British and American novelists associated with postmodernism, from the 'pioneers', Beckett, Borges and Burroughs, to important post-war writers such as Pynchon, Carter, Atwood, Morrison, Gibson, Auster, DeLillo, and Ellis. Designed for students and clearly written, this Introduction explains the preoccupations, styles and techniques that unite postmodern authors. Their work is characterized by a self-reflexive acknowledgement of its status as fiction, and by the various ways in which it challenges readers to question common-sense and commonplace assumptions about literature.